What the Hell is the DAO?

DAO the Decentralized Autonomous Organization built on the Ethereum blockchain – that stores and transmits Ether and Ethereum-based assets – is the fastest growing crowdfunded campaign in history. In fact the DAO crowdfunded campaign reached 10% of all ether (the virtual currency that comes out of Ethereum) in existence in the #DAO with $83,210,000 the sale is live, with final funding could be higher or lower and counting. It is important to highlight though that these funds are being held by design in the cryptocurrency known as Ether, the actual USD amount raised will vary in line with the Ether > USD exchange rate at any given moment.

Don Tapscott, the influential and authoritative author, a world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, and in the economic and social impact of technology is someone that advises business and government and that wrote among other books such as The Digital Economy, Wikinomics is bold on the subject and reflects about Blockchain that:

The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation — powered by blockchain technology — is bringing us the Internet of value: a new platform to reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.

Blockchain is a vast, global distributed ledger or database running on millions of devices and open to anyone, where not just information but anything of value — money, but also titles, deeds, identities, even votes — can be moved, stored and managed securely and privately. Trust is established through mass collaboration and clever code rather than by powerful intermediaries like governments and banks.

What is the Elements Project? Elements is an open source collaborative project where we work on a collection of experiments to more rapidly bring technical innovation to Bitcoin. Elements are features that are proposed and developed in this technical community that in arbitrary combinations can be fashioned into sidechains.

Who Funds Bitcoin:

Some companies (such as Bitware Co. and BitPay) fund development of alternative Bitcoin implementations, of which the code can potentially be forked and included in Bitcoin Core. Other companies (including Lightning, Blockchain and, again, Blockstream) fund development of lightning networks, which is technically not Bitcoin Core, but is closely intertwined as it works toward the same vision and mission for Bitcoin.

Companies like Oracilze, Smartcontract.com and others building what is effectively middleware solutions, are going to play a key role in helping commercialize Blockchain applications by helping make smart-contracts useful in the real world.

Since its conception, Blockstream has grown to be one of the top-funded Bitcoin companies in the space, with total investments adding up to $76 million from various (institutional) investors including Horizons Ventures, AXA Strategic Ventures, Digital Garage and, again, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Blockstream, which received a $21 million funding round last year andemploys several Bitcoin Core developers, intends to deploy the sidechain among different exchanges and other Bitcoin service providers. Users with accounts at several of these exchanges will then be able to move bitcoin from one account to another within an instant, instead of having to wait for the transaction to confirm on the blockchain.

Ethereum is a programmable blockchain.

Rather than give users a set of pre-defined operations (e.g. bitcoin transactions), Ethereum allows users to create their own operations of any complexity they wish. In this way, it serves as a platform for many different types of decentralized blockchain applications, including but not limited to cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum in the narrow sense refers to a suite of protocols that define a platform for decentralised applications. At the heart of it is the Ethereum Virtual Machine (“EVM”), which can execute code of arbitrary algorithmic complexity. In computer science terms, Ethereum is “Turing complete”. Developers can create applications that run on the EVM using friendly programming languages modelled on existing languages like JavaScript and Python.

Like any blockchain, Ethereum also includes a peer-to-peer network protocol. The Ethereum blockchain database is maintained and updated by many nodes connected to the network. Each and every node of the network runs the EVM and executes the same instructions. For this reason, Ethereum is sometimes described evocatively as a “world computer”.

Whereas the Bitcoin blockchain was purely a list of transactions, Ethereum’s basic unit is the account. The Ethereum blockchain tracks the state of every account, and all state transitions on the Ethereum blockchain are transfers of value and information between accounts. There are two types of accounts:

Whereas the Bitcoin blockchain was purely a list of transactions, Ethereum’s basic unit is the account. The Ethereum blockchain tracks the state of every account, and all state transitions on the Ethereum blockchain are transfers of value and information between accounts. There are two types of accounts:

Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs), which are controlled by private keys

Contract Accounts, which are controlled by their contract code and can only be “activated” by an EOA

For most users, the basic difference between these is that human users control EOAs – because they can control the private keys which give control over an EOA. Contract accounts, on the other hand, are governed by their internal code. If they are “controlled” by a human user, it is because they areprogrammed to be controlled by an EOA with a certain address, which is in turn controlled by whoever holds the private keys that control that EOA. The popular term “smart contracts” refers to code in a Contract Account – programs that execute when a transaction is sent to that account. Users can create new contracts by deploying code to the blockchain.